ROSES & RASPBERRIES

An ‘out of the lurch’ rose

A rose goes to the Del Mar hotels that are housing the stranded performers of Valitar. The horse show was abruptly canceled Nov. 21 by producers Mark and Tatyana Remley, who cited slow ticket sales.

The show premiered a few weeks ago, featuring 55 horses and 25 performers in a 45,000-square-foot tent at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The performers say they hadn’t been paid in three weeks, and they were facing eviction from housing in the South Bay that was arranged by the producers. But the Del Mar Hilton, Grand Pacific Resorts and Clarion Inn Del Mar Inn have stepped forward to provide free housing until the performers can raise enough money to get themselves and their personal horses back home.

A show to benefit the group was scheduled for Saturday at the fairgrounds. We hope they sold enough tickets to merit a second or third performance, and that these folks get home safely. Also deserving praise are fairgrounds officials, who donated a free ticket to the 2013 San Diego County Fair for each paid ticket to the benefit show.

A ‘loose with the tax dollars’ razz

A raspberry goes to the Poway Unified School District board members who decided to make Superintendent John Collins the highest-paid superintendent in San Diego County, and among the highest in California.

The Watchdog reported Nov. 30 that Poway Unified is paying Collins $386,000 a year, including a rare perk that allows him to take $67,000 in cash or buy retirement service credits.

To be sure, Poway Unified is among the state’s best-performing school districts. Collins has only been the superintendent since 2010, but he was a longtime administrator and teacher in the district, so he deserves some of the credit for such success.

However, the school board is overpaying him by almost every conceivable measure. For perspective, he makes $9,000 less than the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has 19 times more students than Poway Unified and a budget that’s 23 times larger.

We’ll mention here that Poway Unified became a national poster child for bad financial decisions after news broke that the district issued so-called capital appreciation bonds that borrowed $105 million at a cost to taxpayers over 40 years of nearly $1 billion. It isn’t clear how deeply involved Collins was in persuading the board to approve the financing gimmick, but the bonds were sold to investors on his watch in 2011.

The point, of course, is that wasting money at every level results in missed opportunities for students. Poway Unified students deserve the best administration that money can buy. Parents and taxpayers should insist that their elected board figure out how to attract and keep top management talent for far less.